Armen Baldryan, Founding Director of Unicomp:

"We Don't Have the Right to Fall behind the Rest of the World in the 21st Century"

The regular, already third DigiTec business forum was held in Yerevan on June 9 and 10. Speaker at the opening ceremony was RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan.

Unicomp company is among the standing and active participants of DigiTec and, according to its Founding Director, a long time mem­ber of the Information Technologies Development Support Council (ITDSC) under the RA Prime Minister, Armen Baldryan (who recently was awarded with the Anania Shirakatsi Medal), the event provides IT companies and their cus­tomers with a good opportunity to get acquainted with each other and pre­sent new products and services. Mr Baldryan emphasized that there is an increase in the number of participants this year, including delegations from East European countries like Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, others which are participating for the first time.

What did Unicomp offer at the business forum to meet the day-to­day increasing requirements of Armenian consumers? According to Mr Baldryan, one of the rapidly developing activities of his company is providing services to telecommuni­cation companies. In this sphere, Unicomp has been working with HTC Company for a long time (as the first ever Armenian company) and has been producing the latest commu­nicators, or , simply speaking, smart-phones, which are very important tool for businessmen and, in general, people using multimedia.

President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan handing the Award to Armen Baldryan

"We are also working on pro­gramming solutions including hard­ware, software and services with another world famous company, our long running partner Hewlett Packard.(At the moment Unicomp holds the top accolade for an HP inte­grator company, - HP Gold Preferred Partner - NT). We have already start­ed working with EMC, which is a world largest company producing storages and software solutions for E-governance," said Armen Baldryan. Taking the opportunity, your cor­respondent asked Mr Baldryan about the international IT forums that he has participated in the past months. Armen Baldryan told us the follow­ing: "On April 15-20 I participated in a forum held by Intel called "Intel Learning Alliance Summit" which was devoted to the radical reforms in education to best meet the current requirements. Perhaps the most piv­otal was the principle of "one student, one computer." (To note, Mr Baldryan is a long time member of the Intel EMEA Council, and Unicomp is still the only company in Armenia holding the highest status for an integrator company, the Intel Channel Partner Premier Member -NT). One of the best examples of its implementation can be seen in Portugal where all students have been distributed computers for free. That was made possible after Portugal established the Intel production in the country and they are working with Brazil and 7-8 other countries as well. During the forum, we got acquainted with the experience of dif­ferent countries in the sphere and it is done at the highest, governmental level. Educational systems are changing rapidly in many countries and those changes are not only due to the enlargement of IT applications, but are of a broader, global nature because the entire concept of educa­tion is undergoing changes. The cen­tral figure in the education process not as much the teacher or even knowledge, but the student himself. The learning process becomes more individual because applying computers allows teachers to provide knowl­edge to each student individually. What's very important here is that, in addition to the so-called "official" textbooks, students can have access to different sources through the Internet. During the forum, it was stressed that the development of com­puterized education must have the so-called "ergonomic" direction; in other words, children's health and issues related to blocking unwanted infor­mation must be taken into considera­tion. These issues have always been in the focus of Intel as the Corporation orders different organi­zations various researches on the exclusion of negative impact of PC on children's health yet in the stage of computer designing or software development. I must mention that, thanks to such measures, an "ecosys­tem" was established two years ago and by now including various organizations, government bodies and large-scale companies such as Intel,-to solve issues related to public edu­cation". How applicable is that model in Armenia? Armen Baldryan replied: "This is already today's imperative and you can't escape it. In Armenia, (I don't know why), this issue is always connected to finances, but I think financial problems can always be solved. The most important thing is to develop conceptual issues. We simply don't have the right to fall behind the rest of the world in the 21st century." On May 16-22, in Italy, NATO and Cisco company organized con­ference on networks security. Armen Baldryan participated in it along with the Armenian delegation. One of the most important issues discussed dur­ing the conference was how to allow developing countries to have maximum access to computer networks and the Internet and, of course, the fundamental issue was ensuring secu­rity of information on the Internet, he said. Executive Director of Enterprises Incubator Foundation Bagrat Yengibaryan presented Armenia's official position on the issue and informed that it is expected that every home in Armenia will have access to 100 MB computer net­work and that the ITSDC recently approved the concept and the three-year timeline to form ICT society in Armenia. On May 28, on the occasion of the First Republic Day, Armen Baldryan was among the awarded with Anania Shirakatsi Medal for notable success in the spheres of economy and science. On that occasion, Armen Baldryan emphasized that though it was a great honor for him to receive the award, it also made him feel responsible and that is why, accord­ing to him, Unicomp is doing every­thing possible to not stay behind global processes taking place in the IT sphere. The company holds train­ing courses for Unicomp employees, including abroad and actively partici­pate in different discussions held at the RA Government.

As member of the Selection Panel of the RA Presidential Global IT Award established last year, A. Baldryan reminded that on June 28, the one who first decorated that award, the "legend" of IT, retired CEO/Chairman of Intel, Dr Craig Barret will personally receive the award from the RA President. Mr Baldryan added that the event will once again "make" the world remem­ber Armenia and will serve as an impetus for further development of IT and education in Armenia.